The present invention relates to a reproducing apparatus and a recording apparatus used in conjunction with storage media. More particularly, the invention relates to a reproducing apparatus and a recording apparatus for handling copyright-protected and copyright-unprotected files as data to be recorded to a storage medium.
Today, recording and reproducing apparatuses capable of recording and reproducing various kinds of audio information as digital data have gained widespread use.
Audio information recorded and reproduced by such recording and reproducing apparatus is of high sound quality because the information is composed of digital data. With no deterioration in sound quality after repeated copying, such digital data need to be protected for copyrights particularly in the case of pieces of music created by artists. Arrangements have been proposed to encrypt audio information of high sound quality such as music requiring copyright protection (simply called the music information hereunder) upon recording, and to decrypt the encrypted music information for playback. The proposed arrangements protect copyrights illustratively by preventing any illegal or inappropriate device with no decryption function from recording or reproducing data correctly or from copying data illegally.
On the other hand, there is little need to maintain high sound quality or to protect copyrights regarding audio information acquired by users recording their own voice as a way of taking notes (the information will be called the voice information hereunder as opposed to the music information).
Under these circumstances, it has been possible to envisage a recording and reproducing system capable of recording copyright-protected, encrypted music information and copyright-unprotected, unencrypted voice information to a single storage medium in a mixed manner, and of reproducing such information from the storage medium.
One suitable way to manage such music and voice information held mixedly on the same storage medium is by adopting a directory management scheme used by personal computers. That is, a group of music information files and a group of voice information files are placed under a different directory each for separated information management.